American Airlines Dominates U.S. Summer Travel – United Leads Across The Atlantic – View from the Wing

American Airlines Dominates U.S. Summer Travel – United Leads Across The Atlantic

by Gary Leff on July 9, 2024

Data from Aviation analytics company Cirium shows that American Airlines offers the most seats of any airline this summer. Using schedule data for this month, they edge out Southwest Airlines as the largest carrier by the measure. Both American and Southwest have a heavily domestic-focused network, and don’t fly their seats as far as United Airlines (or Delta).

Overall domestic scheduled seats are up 6% year-over-year despite aircraft delivery delays, especially by Boeing. Seats are up 7.8% across the Atlantic this month with Delta just a hair’s breadth behind United Airlines (which is much larger across the Pacific).

Scheduled Domestic Seats For Summer

American Airlines flies the most domestic seats – but Southwest Airlines is surprisingly close.

Among the fastest growth is Breeze (33.36%), which is new and growing off a low base, so that makes sense. Ultra low cost carriers Spirit, Frontier, and Sun County have all grown more than 20% as well (21% – 36%). They’ve faced higher costs and are trying to amortize those costs across more seats.

Meanwhile American grew 8% – they’ve acknowledged they have probably added seats too quickly. In contrast Delta grew 5% and United 3%.

Most shocking is that JetBlue shrank 9%. They’re troubled and a lot of the flying they were doing was unprofitable, though an axiom in aviation is that you can’t shrink to profitability. They need to find places to fly that make money.

Cirium shares that the single route with the most seats this month isn’t New York LaGuardia – Chicago O’Hare… it’s Seattle – Anchorage with approximately 146,000 seats, 80% of which are flown by Alaska Airlines. Of course Anchorage is a heavily seasonal market. In May 2020, when passenger travel was largely shut down, Anchorage was actually the busiest airport in the world due to cargo.

Source: Cirium

Who Rules The Atlantic?

Summer Europe grows substantially – flexing capacity nearly 20% compared to off-peak periods – and this summer continues that trend. Overall there will be nearly 8% more seats flown compared to last summer, aided not just by continued secular demand trends but also the July Olympics in Paris. Air France is growing seat capacity over 15% – more than any other major carrier.

United is biggest by seats across the Pond, but only barely. Delta is closer than you’d expect (but United is much bigger across the Pacific and overall long haul).

American, which lacks transpacific depth, surprisingly offers only 21% fewer transatlantic seats than Delta – though American’s schedule to Europe is heavily seasonal and this is the peak. One of American’s problems is its lack of seats to Europe over the summer – they haven’t been flying where people want to go – and they’re constrained not just by Boeing aircraft delivery delays but by too-aggressively retiring aircraft during the pandemic. American dropped its Boeing 757, Boeing 767 and Airbus A330 fleets and then didn’t have the planes to fly.

The greatest percentage growth in seats for U.S. – Europe (not most seats) is Denmark (27%) followed by Croatia (17%) and Spain (16%).

Source: Cirium

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